After trying for my entire adulthood, I finally have a workshop. There’s more to it than this, but the fact that my tools and supplies are visible, organized and accessible at the same time is unprecedented.

The white cabinet is actually an Ikea kitchen cabinet — I bought it to use up a bunch of Ikea drawers left over from the remodel (don’t ask — seriously, don’t) and then I made a countertop for it. The drawers are nice and deep and hold my tools that don’t have cases.

I wish I had a whole bunch more of those steel Wall Control pegboards — my girlfriend got them for me for Christmas and they are absolutely badass.

Offscreen to the left is another tech bench with organizer drawers and a top shelf with a neat row of tools in cases. I still have a bit of work to do, some more bins to consolidate and some duplicate tools to get rid of. It was deeply embarrassing how many things I had multiples of; a whole bin of picture-hanging hardware and hollow-wall anchors, five stapleguns (!) eight measuring tapes (damn things just disappear all the time) four dustpans, five hammers, two jigsaws, three circular saws, enough plant hooks to turn the library into a forest, several pounds of drywall screws, enough pegboard accessories for about another whole garage (I’ve been gearing up for this for over a decade). It was just ridiculous.

But it’s here and now I can finish so many of the projects that remain around the house. First project will be the knobs in the kitchen at last, then I will make two windowsills so that I can call one room in the house completely done (the master bathroom), Next will be the kitchen, then its time to focus on the library I think.

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I called up and went through the list of all the things you’re not allowed to do (gang imagery, celebrities, copyright infringement etc.) and showed that my image passed the criteria. The lady kept blaming the “back office” and evading me, but eventually I cornered the lady into saying that they weren’t going to print it because it was ugly. “We prefer the verbiage ‘offensive’ to ‘ugly’.”

She also revealed that they’re only looking for snapshots — which is nowhere on their site.  Interestingly, they say “pets, or a favorite photo,” and their ads show an evil overlord adding kittens to his.  But it seems marmots are off the list.

 Update:

I tried again, uploading the one without the mask to see if it was less ugly.  Here’s what I got back:

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Celebrities such as actors, musicians, athletes, or cartoons.

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I talked to a nice, not disdainful lady named Dee who asked me who the man was. I told her it was a random ambrotype from the 1800’s. I could have said it was an ancestor and probably gotten it through but I wanted to see if the truth would work. She said that based on what I said she would try to put it through again, no guarantees.

My early professional career started with the VideoVision card, enabling your computer to capture video and enabling you to send your computer monitor out to a TV screen.  It was one of the early entries at both, and and it was the best.  Then I worked on the VideoVision Studio upgrade, a JPEG add-on that allowed it to do full-motion full-quality video on a desktop Mac (with a stonking huge, fast disk array).  This was really cool.  The first one to do this on the desktop threw away a field (an important part of the video that makes the motion smooth — and represents half the image data) and compressed the daylights out of what was left; ours could ease up on the compression if your disk was faster  so someone with a good system could compete with the big editing and post houses.  This enabled a cottage industry of independent professionals to spring up, and I was proud of the role I played in that.

Then DV came along and I got involved in software codecs, and enabled ordinary humans to edit videos without elaborate systems.  This was also fantastic.  Oh, and while I was there I did some really good work at learning how to represent a company online, and designed Radius’ first public-facing site and loaded it with real information that really helped people get the most out of these systems.

From there I went to Adobe, to the Premiere team, where I continued to make sure that products changed the technological landscape for content creation.  I added a lot of innovation around metadata interoperability that will enable people to get the most out of the media they create.  I went to the Scene7 group, a service at Adobe which enabled small companies to have sophisticated imagery and video on their Web sites without the massive infrastructure costs and complexities of actually hosting it themselves.

And now, I’m at PRN.  What am I enabling here?  In-store advertising. I’m not enabling anything, really.  I’m not delivering power to people.  I’m not changing the world.

It’s taking some getting used to.

There might be opportunities for real innovation; I see some already.  But I need to accept that I AM IN ADVERTISING.

I’m finding that sites that are even soliciting resumés for a given position aren’t responding at all.  You submit it and a badly designed web forms processor reports in geekspeak that the upload succeeded, and after that… [sound of crickets chirping in the distance…]

In the litigious US, it’s also become bad practice to actually tell the prospective employee why they didn’t get the job.  It opens one up to lawsuits.  And because sume buttheads sued companies over what was said about why they didn’t get a job, none of us get to find out any more.  ”Wrong fit.”  I’ve asked for tips on my interviewing technique or critiques, but I get the same response as if I had submitted a resumé.

It creates a culture of desperation, an unfortunate establishment of an extreme power imbalance that has a historic habit of eroding labor relations and even employee’s rights.  I’ve already seen hints of that “Just be glad you have a job” attitude from employers that is so dangerous.It’s easy to forget in these difficult times that companies really do need us employees to exist — the proof is that there are open reqs here and there. Do you think that a publicly-held company would be actually hiring anyone if they weren’t desperate to fill it?  Shareholders don’t like that; they want to see headcount or at least operating expenses go down. So have a little pride, and don’t just take whatever bullshit they try to hand you.  Sure, they’ll just hire someone else with a little less self-respect, but they’ll also know that they had to let a better candidate walk away, which at least puts a damper on their hubris, and maybe keep it from running amok.

This was my ten year service trophy from Adobe. Since I got sacked last month, they had to send it to my house. That was fun to open.

You’d think they might have arranged to have something more appropriate on the little cards that came in an envelope with it.

What do I do with this? Keep it until it doesn’t stab me? Just get rid of it? What do people do with these after they don’t work at a company any more (for ANY reason)?

Now here’s the tough one.  Her amplifier.  The power amp under the driver’s seat has caught a bit of abuse in seven years and the right channels for both pairs of speakers were having problems.  Seems the posts from the RCA connectors sheared off inside the receptacles.  I managed to fish one out with a pair of pliers but the other one is way in there.

So being me, I took the thing apart.  I was hoping to poke the post out from behind but the connector is buried.  To slide the mainboard out turned out to be incredibly involved as this Arc Audio Class D amp consists of maybe 30 amplifier IC’s pasted to long heatsink rails with thermal grease and as many black metal retaining clips.  So I let my son remove the clips and I loosened the IC’s from their greasy seal and eventually, after finding a few more screws that were required (and removing a few screws that really didn’t need removing), I slid the mainboard out.  A bittersweet victory because I know that now I’m going to have to run to Fry’s to get more thermal grease — the little tube I have ain’t gonna cut it — and grease and clip and screw it all back together.  Not to mention rebuilding the RCA connectors without losing much wire — there’s a minimum of play to work with and it might end up being a splice job — and I’ll have to replace a fuse I think because (ahem) the hot brushed the case when I was deinstalling it.

And it turns out that’s not going to be enough. I figured I needed to take a break before desoldering the six points holding the connector block in place.  So I sat and had a think, and I think that my best bet is to solder something to the errant post and yank it out when the solder dries.  It might melt the connector interior plastic a bit, which is why I had initially dismissed the idea, but I keep getting into riskier territory with this $350 amp and this is starting to sound safer.

The irritating thing is that I could have taken that approach without even cracking the case.

The accursed office shelves are finally up. Not having these has created chaos for three years. I still have to finish one plank in the top left corner that needs special treament due to the roof slant, but the hard part is finished.

They’re seriously overbuilt because I plan to load them with the various paper stocks we’ve accumulated, which currently occupy several very heavy boxes. And you can’t just build a couple shelves heavy duty, you kind of have to build them all that way.

I tried to build them cheaply myself; it didn’t work. I built them myself but it was not cheap. I ended up with like 26 brackets at $7 a piece (the cheaper ones looked wimpy), and like $130 in melamine shelf planks. Plus I replaced the weedy little bracket screws with big ol’ ⅜” x 2½” lag screws and washers to go right into the studs (I am now emotionally attached to the Makita cordless impact driver I bought recently) and I bought tie plates for the joins up on the tops to keep them even and distribute the weight a bit. All this bought me a whopping 30 square feet of strong shelf space. I think these shelves could hold me.

(The fun part is knowing that all this is probably making somebody out there feel stirrings in naughty places.)

I had a cool little system. The impact drill for the heavy work of screwing in the big lags and drilling pilot holes all over the place and the little Bosch cordless screwdriver for everything else. I used a laser level on a tripod to get everything even, which worked GREAT, and a little mini level to cross-check and straighten the bracket. I could rapidly go from bracket to bracket alternating between the three hand tools. Sweet.

And finally, after three years, I was able to install the in-wall speaker you see there. I’ve been waiting for the shelves to go in so I knew where I could install that; the ugly wire has been hanging out of a tiny lump in the wall like a persisent umbilicus for this whole time, mocking me. Now I can go around putting the rest of them in (which will clear space in my wiring closet) and reach a new kind of nerdvana. I’ll have music in my room, the kitchen, this office and even my bathroom.

I confess I had somehow forgotten how astonishingly pervasive drywall dust is, especially when you use a Rotozip, and the room got kind of trashed. Oops.

So, between my new (ahem) flexibility in schedule and the need to conserve money, I’ve begun to cook it myself. Starting with breakfasts, mostly. I have a lot to learn. Like — I have to plan ahead! Stuff has to thaw. That’s why, yesterday morning, I ended up cooking those kinda crummy meatless sausages; they don’t need to thaw. But hey — they got et. Check! I tried to cook eggs at the same time. I’m not really ready for that; it’s kind of hectic and I didn’t get to give the eggs the loving attention I usually like to — lots of fussing and adding spices etc. — but I got it done and we both ate it, it was OK.

Today I got the mango sausages from Trader Joe’s, which went considerably better. I didn’t try to cook them at the same time as anything. Later I cooked an egg and toasted an english muffin and added a slice of Havarti cheese and made myself a breakfast muffin.

Shosh identified the trend and got me some things I’ll need at the grocery store, which was pretty nice. But I’m going through a lot of pans now so I kind of have to wash them right away since we don’t run the dishwasher that often. The sucky part is that it’s easy for me to get distracted and forget to come back and do so after everything’s cool enough.

Distracted, for example, by my MP3 server.

I’m using it more often too, now; it’s on an Iomega Home Media Network Drive which can serve music via DLNA and iTunes, so in theory my computers, my living room receiver (an Onkyo TX-NR906), and even my TV (!) (an Samsung LN40B650 1080p LCD) can play music from it directly. And during my time off in October I used features in my Airport Express and my receiver, allowing me to route iTunes output to the living room stereo and, by extension, the speakers in my wife’s studio (I LOVE finally using the just-in-case wiring I put into my walls during the remodel). I’m approaching nerdvana, right?

Well, there was one hitch.The server had indexed like 80,000 songs, so whenever I chose that server it would take like FOUR minutes (literally) to load the library. And I quickly discovered that you can’t make playlists from shared servers. (@%$^$%*) Finally, a problem I’ve been dreading solving for a long time:

Duplicates!
My main folder has a lot of dupes from accidentally reripping, or consolidating libraries or whatever. Plus, that server hosts all my backups from various retired machines, iPods and (ahem) other peoples’ collections. (Like, 290GB worth!) So when I hit that server I’d have like 5 copies of Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones or whatever and each song would play 5 times in a row. Combined with the lack of playlisting, there was really nothing for it but to consolidate those libraries.

I guess I kept waiting for the software that would go by ID3 tag and neatly consolidate my libraries for me and eliminate duplicates. I tried a few Windows products that all sucked, and I didn’t see anything promising on the Mac. So I copied the server to a USB drive and sat and consolidated everything more or less by brute force. It sucked, and took forever. But I was really surprised at how much music I have, stuff I didn’t even know I had. Kind of exciting, actually.By the time I had finished I was down to 180GB. I suspect there are plenty more duplicates, so I’m going to go through it again, maybe using some of the organizational features in iTunes itself. But I’m already in vastly better shape.

I really like that I’m able to make music a part of my life again. It kind of fell by the wayside.

I helped out at my kid’s school during the gardening section.  It was pretty fun to watch all the kids get into rooting through compost to pluck out the worms to seed our new compost bin.  Some of the kids refused to touch the worms, painstakingly gathering them one by one with sticks and trowels, where other kids harvested handfuls at a time.  There was no pattern — boys girls, whatever.  It simply varied from kid to kid.  The best part was seeing them squeamish at first and then get the hang of it, enthusiastically.

My amazingly flaky plumber showed up to look at a few problems around the house.  No results yet, but finally we’re underway.

Ah, geek update: My iPhone magically started syncing to MobileMe, merging it with the stale data on the phone.  So I had to go through MobileMe one more time to prune the contacts, 264 in all.  It did a lot of weird things like re-merging matching phone numbers so that there would be two identical entries, and the Web site does not always display the data fields that can be seen in the address books on the phone and the Mac (making it hard to figure out which duplicate entry to nuke), but whatever. It’s all sorted now and I’ve now synced the address books of all the Macs in the house.  I’ve done the same for my wife’s iPhone too.  She uses Thunderbird as her mail client, which does not currently sync to the Mac address book, so all that data is orphaned in Thunderbird, but the way she uses the Mac and the phone it probably won’t matter.

I had a lot of trouble staying awake today, and took I guess five little catnaps.

Big trauma in the house:  I killed HBO and Showtime, then killed the upper block of channels (110 to 570 or something) to get the cable bill from $150 (!) down to a still-horrifying $80.  That block carried National Geographic (Lockdown and Globe Trekker) and BBC America (Graham Norton, Being Human and — ouch — Torchwood).  That block is an extra $17 a month and I really don’t think it’s worth it.  But Shoshanah showed me how many shows on the TiVo were from that block and is begging me to add those back in.

OK, bedtime.

I had recently, at long last, found the data cable for my old Samsung phone so i could suck all the contacts off of it.  So I finally sat down and consolidated all that stuff once and for all.  Up to the cloud it went, down to my phone it didn’t.  I have noidea why.  MobileMe could find my phone via GPS, and the options were all turned on, and I tried syncing from the system prefs and updating from the MobileMe web site. No dice.

And when I headed downtown to conduct some business at the Adobe offices, the guy I called had left his cel phone in his trunk.  So I was stuck in the lobby, still smarting from the mild humiliation of the guy at the parking garage booth calling his manager to see if it was OK to let me in the building, and I could not find anyone in my phone list who was actually in the building at the time.  They were in the master phonelist in MobileMe, but Apple does not allow you to log into that site from the iPhone, insisting resolutely that there is no need as everything is synchronized.

I was there in the lobby for almost 40 minutes before I managed to get upstairs.

On the bright side I saw a buddy from another product team who said there were “rumblings” about needing some extra help on a product I like and know very well, so that could be cool.  I guess that’s why the universe stuck me in that lobby for all that time.

After Adobe I went to Fry’s to return a barbequeued USB hub.  I wonder if plugging all those drives into it fried it?  In any case I got a different one that works very well.  While I was there I surveyed the computer training books aisle, rows of books with titles like “ASP.NET for Dummies,” and I was awestruck by all the stuff I don’t know.  I’m going to have to focus the scope of my retraining a little.

So I guess it was mostly a down day.  Not without its highlights, but it was the first really hard day emotionally for me since the day I got sacked.